Fantasy Football: The 2016 Fifteen

It's that time of year again where we look back at the NFL draft and look ahead to the new FF season. And what a draft it was too. I couldn't be happier about my Dallas Cowboys picking a BUCKEYE in the first round. I'm sure Elliott will do well for them. I was a little disappointed in my Tampa Bay Buccaneers though. I thought they should have taken WR Treadwell - after maybe trading down a little in the first round. Hargreaves is okay, but I felt there were just as good CB's in the later rounds and we really need someone to compliment Mike Evans.

Anyhow, I have completed drafting my fantasy football teams for this year and what a wild two days it was.

First, I discovered that ESPN has expanded their number of free teams you can play from 10 to 25. That's a lot of teams. For everyone who knows me, I only play ten teams. I used to play 12 teams back when I played on Yahoo! and CBS leagues. I quit though to focus on just one league and the league that won out was ESPN.

I consolidated my teams down from 12 to 10. (Yahoo! - 4, CBS - 3, and I played only 5 teams in ESPN before I dropped the other two leagues a few years ago.) But now, since the number of free teams have been greatly expanded, I decided to bring my other 2 teams from out of retirement and I decided to add 3 new teams to the mix. This year, I play 15 teams.

 My primary teams are: 1) Piketon Red Streaks, 2) Chillicothe Paints, 3) Ohio Wildcats, 4) Waverly Thrashers, 5) Ross County Warriors, 6) Triple X, 7) New Mexico Scorpions, 8) Roswell Aliens, 9) Columbus Bandits, and 10) Kingston Kings.

The two teams I brought back from retirement are: 1) Santa Fe Eagles, and 2) Quebec Knights.

The three new teams I am adding for this year are: 1) Tampa Bay Lightning, 2) London Tigers, and 3) Utah Cougars.

I drafted my teams inside of two days and for the most part, I thought I did a pretty good job. For anyone keeping up, the past four years I have been on fire in FF. I have gotten 90 % of my teams in the playoffs and 75 % of those teams into the championship game of their respective leagues. I have won 16 championships over the past four years.

  While I believe I have done another good job of drafting, I did want to talk about a few of my teams, starting with Piketon.

Piketon is my original team. They started out as the Pike City Pokes for a few years before I changed them to Piketon Red Streaks, which is the name of our high school team here. But my FF season kicks off with drafting this team first. I got some really solid players too and some amazing depth.

A lot of my teams have many of the same players on them but I do try to mix things up here and there. And every year I have my 3 - 5 players that I call my "golden boys". This year, it is QB Blake Bortles, and Derek Carr, RB's David Johnson, Thomas Rawls, and Jeremy Langford, and WR's A.J. Green, Jarvis Landry and Willie Snead. I also favored K's Justin Tucker, and the rookie, Roberto Aguayo from Buccaneers. My top D's for this year are, Cardinals, Texans, Bengals, and Jets.

Of course, the whole idea behind my strategy for drafting is getting value from each pick in each of the sixteens rounds.

Interestingly enough, my team, Waverly Thrashers, features the number 1 RB from last year, Devonta Freeman of the Falcons, and the number 6 and 7 ranked RB's from last season, Lamar Miller of the Dolphins (now with Texans) and David Johnson of the Cardinals, who was a rookie last year. So basically, I got in this draft of 2016, three of the top 7 RB's from 2015. Not too shabby.

Also a side note, my team Ohio Wildcats features the last two number one RB's in FF. last years number one, Devonta Freeman, and the 2014 number one RB, Le'Veon Bell of the Steelers.  Le'Veon got hurt early in the season last year and missed the last 14 games. I am hoping he comes back at full strength and becomes the dominate RB he was two years ago, while pinning my hopes that Freeman repeats last season. If this works out, I could have one hell of a 1-2 punch in my backfield.

I can't wait for the season to begin even though last year, I was hit with more injuries than any season before. I hope for a bit easier road in 2016. And while last year was probably the best year I had in FF, I hope to repeat that great success this season.

Wish me luck!